I am new to this forum also to matte paiting. My art director gives me an assignment for a printing image, which is a matte paiting for the backgroud - stomy sky. He gives me an image which he got from the net, ask me to make it to a 6000x4000 fine detailed image for the magazine. He does not want me to show any paint brush stoke, has to be photo realistic. I don't know if there is a technic you can use to blow up a small image to a magazine print. It looks very pixelized. Does anyone ever encounterd this situation? Any technic you can use? Now I am just taking photos and try to adjust and match the shape of the clouds from the small image he gave to me, then doing colour adjusting to match the colour. Paint on top of it if necessary. Is this the correct way to work? How long usually this type of work takes?

Tell your boss not to be cheap and purchase a professional image from gettyimages.com. and modify that one. You can't produce miracles. If it's pixelated now only GOD can make it 6000x whatever at print rez.
But you know what...spend weeks trying AND THEN tell him. :) Maybe that will shed some light into that black hole of his for next time.

it's not your fault but it can't be done. Print rez for mags and the junk u get from the net is apples and oranges. And turning an apple into an orange is God's domain...not yours. :)

I can't believe some people man..clueless. Art Director even! lol
Your in Montreal!? Where do you work? Maybe I can pass by and apply for that Art Dir. position. LOLOL might be vacant soon.

The best way as +smooth+ said is to buy a high res. image and modify that.

You can also

- Resize the image to its final version.
- Then use filters such as Noise>Median.. and try to get rid of the big pixels as much as you can.
- This way you will lose the details but keep the colors and shapes
- Then divide it to small parts, which you want to add details
- Now use similar available sky photosfor each part and add detail to each small part

Thanks homer. This is what I am doing now, I am gald that I am on right track. I am using hi-res coulds photos to replace the original clouds piece by piece, it will not look exactly the same, but will keep the shape and layout, also has the details of texture of clouds, then I will add the lighting. I think it will take me at least 3 days of work.

You can also try Pixel Smart Scale from Extensis and Altamira's Genuine Fractals for uprezing. They use fractal algorhythms to interpolate so you can rez up quite a bit without getting pixelation. This might be just the solution for skies. I think both companies let you download demo versions.

Try increasing the size 10% at a time. I made an action to do this after reading about it in some book or other, and it works surprisingly well. When I need to make an image larger I just click my action over and over until it is the size I need.